


The Celestial Clock

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: The Dean's Watch - Elizabeth Goudge
Genre: Cathedral City, Gen, Horology, Post-Canon, Redemption, Yuletide 2019, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:07:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21905704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Isaac walked out into the sunshine, and said to himself, "I shall make the celestial clock again. I shall make it for Mrs Ayscough."
Comments: 11
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Celestial Clock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mrsredboots](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsredboots/gifts).



The clouds flew like banners behind the bastions of the three cathedral towers, and the sky was glorious with dappled things, with the couple-coloured gold and pink triumph of the setting sun. On some evenings there was a quality of infinity to the sky over the fens, as if the firmament was both within reach and very far away, and on this summer evening the air had a particular quality of translucence which suggested the faint light of every far-distant star could be captured in a eel-net and stored in a fire-fly lantern. Such a sky drew the child Bella to the window of her schoolroom and planted her there to gather its glory, for Bella was not a self effacing child and therefore perceived beauty in relationship to her own lace-petticoated and dimpled charms. It captured as well school-teacher Emma Peabody, who had come to retrieve the errant Bella, and, being in a fragile state of repair, found herself instead firmly attached to Bella's slightly sticky, plump fingers for the duration. 

On Angel Lane, Polly, who was ordinarily far more concerned with the state of her pie-crusts and buttered parsnips than sunsets, found herself on the kitchen doorstep looking up. In fairness to Polly, for whom feeding people was as much an act of love as prayer was to the long-gone monks of her cathedral city, she had a key in her hand and carried in her petticoat an apple turnover for Job, and a potato and pea pasty for Isaac, made with scraps from the dinner they would share later in the evening. Polly was newly-wed, and in that state of grace where she was not quite certain where she herself ended and Job began, so that even two streets away she was aware that Job had just realised he had not eaten since breakfast. Isaac had never quite grasped the notion of regular hours for lunch and dinner, despite Polly's firm application every morning of brown-paper wrapped sandwiches and a pair of polished apples, and neither of them were capable of passing someone in greater need of sustenance without providing what they could. There were many poorer children in the city who had been warmed by Polly's love, without knowing it, as they ate her egg-and-cress or ham-and-cheese sandwiches. 

Polly herself, looking up at the sky, hoped that its triumphant pink heralded clear skies and sunshine, for tomorrow was baking day, and rain always left her loaves flatter than they should be. Then she took a firm hold of her tucked up petticoats, tipped her bonnet to a cheerful slant, and marched briskly towards the clock shop on Cockspur Street where Isaac and Job were sitting at the work-table.

The Celestial Clock was finished. 

It was the second Celestial Clock. Isaac did not like to think about the first, which had been broken, yet in this moment of celebration the golden chalice of the new clock was lent depth and character by the old. It was a lantern clock, built of brass; all its hidden mechanisms were faultless and merry in their function; its fret was a simple, beautiful screen of the reeds and swans of the river bank, designed by Job with penitent joy; and its clock face was a masterpiece, a zodiacal book of hours, every image exquisitely clear and detailed with the most vivid of paints, from the golden locks of the lion's mane to the snapping claws of the stippled sea-crab. The face was Isaac's work, and he was still in that moment of ecstatic completion, when he knew that there was not another stroke of paint in him. His clock was finished, and it was a marvel, as alive to him as the clock-makers of the past from whom Isaac had learned his skills. Job, who was not yet old enough to know that such moments are rare, was wondering how they were to wrap the pine-cone weights and if Mrs. Ayscough would welcome their unheralded arrival, but he loved Isaac deeply, and would no more disturb his master's joy than he would betray his own craftsmanship. They sat in silence, and on the work-bench, the Celestial Clock shone back at them. 

Presently, it shone at Polly, too, and she set herself down and sparkled back at it, wide-eyed with delight. This was mostly due to the clock, which was a thing of joy and wonder, and partly due to her hand and Job's, clasped under the table, for the delight and terror of being married was still new to both of them. But Polly, who brought with her the homely smells of apple pie and pease pudding, was real enough to bring Isaac back from the shining place where he had gone. 

"We must take the clock to Mrs. Ayscough," he said. 

"What, already?" asked Job, for he had momentarily considered the pleasure of having the clock in the shop window, where the entire city might see and comment on its perfection.

"Yes, now," said Isaac.

The first Celestial Clock had been purchased by Isaac's friend Dean Adam Ayscough, and was intended for his beloved wife. That first clock was broken, and the Dean rested under a stone slab in the nave of the cathedral he had served, but this clock was whole and in its beauty, worthy of the Dean's promise. It did not belong to Isaac, but to Mrs. Ayscough. Isaac pulled his silk handkerchief from his pocket, and covered the face of the clock, and found that Job had already spread out the length of velvet from the window. Job was not faultless - sometimes he thought too much of Polly and too little of the shop, and his horizons were already wider than the walls of the city where they lived - but to Isaac he was as much a beloved son as the clocks made by his own hands, and he was grateful every day for Job's thoughtfulness. He let his approval show as he wrapped the clock, and tucked it safely into the crook of his arm. The weights he detached and gave to Job, who tied them carefully into Polly's clean handkerchief. Then they blew out the candles and locked up the shop.

Sunset had been a flaming sword, but dusk fell gently on the streets of the city, heralding not darkness but the lighting of candles in the windows of the houses of the marketplace and the steep, cobbled lanes that led up to the cathedral. On Worship Street, which curved about the great close wall of the Cathedral, the windows were golden, for there lived the doctors and solicitors of the city, working into the night, and their wives and daughters, and the bereaved womenfolk of men who had tended to the spiritual heart of the city as their compatriots tended its corporal cares. Here, in a little house, lived the Dean's widow Elaine Ayscough, whose great beauty had not been lost to grief, but instead refined by it, so that the studied charm of her marriage had been fired into stalwart purpose. From loss, she had made herself her husband's standard-bearer, so that his plans to clear away the shaming slums and build for the people of the city safe houses and gardens should be realised, and she had done so with such effectiveness that the city councillors flinched from her pale beauty and the sharp intelligence she had previously applied only to her own ends. Elaine had basked in the acknowledgement of her beauty, but had never needed the approval of others, and now she was brazen in her advocacy. Yet in her widowhood she had also found, to her own astonishment, friendship. 

"Mrs. Ayscough is not at home, Mr. Peabody," said Mr. Garland. "I am led to believe she is visiting Miss Montague, at Fountains. She will be home shortly if you should like to wait." 

"Thank you, but no, Mr. Garland," said Isaac, who was not so preoccupied that he could not manage a particular bird-like bow of acknowledgement for his old friend. "The clock is finished, you see."

"Ah," said Mr. Garland, who was intimately acquainted with all the preoccupations, triumphs, and concerns of the inhabitants of the society of the cathedral close, was thus aware that Isaac and Job had undertaken the recreation of the Dean's clock, and had been anticipating the moment of completion for some months. "In that case, might I escort you onwards?" He was reaching for his coat and his umbrella as he spoke, for Miss Montague and Mr. Garland were very old friends indeed.

Isaac had opened his mouth to reply when he realised there was a small and extraordinary dense presence at his knee. He looked down. 

"Bella too," said Bella firmly.

"Oh, come now, Miss Bella," said Mr. Garland, but he was sadly aware even as he thought of the neglected nursery tea and the furrowed brow of Bella's beleaguered grandfather that resistance was almost always impossible.

"Cuckoo!" said Bella.

"Not this clock, Miss Bella," said Isaac. "This one chimes." 

For a moment, with real fear, he thought such a configuration was unacceptable, but Bella's moment of doubt was fleeting, accustomed as she was to the many charms of Isaac's workshop. Instead, with queenly assurance, she settled her bonnet on her head and turned on her heel, marching across the cobbles towards the cathedral close. 

It was only then that Isaac realised Bella had carried his sister in her wake. They exchanged awkward glances, for they had only recently begun to mend their relationship, and that only because Mrs. Ayscough had asked Emma to undertake the teaching of plain mending and sewing. No-one refused the Dean's widow. Yet the valuing of Emma's skill had extended to her valuing of herself, and the small wages inherent with the post had enabled new clothing and better food. The Emma that emerged would never be a cheerful woman, but she was far happier than she had been when her anger led to the destruction of the first Celestial Clock, and as a result the Peabody house at Angel Street, apart from the kitchen where Polly cooked for both households, was now hers alone and a kinder and homelier place. Isaac, who had removed himself, Job, and Polly into the smallest and neatest house on Silver Street, had not known such contentment in domestic arrangements was possible. It was with the knowledge that his own warmth hearth awaited that Isaac managed a half smile for his sister: it was with the knowledge that her own small parlour with its lesson plans and samples was hers alone that Emma nodded back. 

It seemed entirely reasonable to both of them that Bella should have entangled her teacher in after-school travels. That was the inevitable consequence of Miss Bella's acquaintance.

The house Fountains to which they processed formed part of the gateway to the cathedral close, and had once been the dower-house of the city's first Duchess, the widow Blanche. On her death it had passed to the cathedral Priory, and then inevitably had become a private house again, being part of the Montague estate ever since. It was an elderly and venerable house, warm with hospitality and the great fires of its medieval past, and although Fountains now housed only Miss Montague and her equally elderly maid Sarah every notable person of the city could be found visiting in Miss Montague's drawing room, and many of them counted her as their greatest friend. It was to Miss Montague that Elaine had come, humbled and grief-stricken, when her husband died, and it was to her now that Elaine took the small triumphs of her life's work. That evening the two of them had moved from the vexed question of planting in the Dean's longed-for public gardens to the design of the lending library, when the brass flap over the letter-box, the easiest way to announce visitors at Fountains, was raised and dropped with extraordinary and insistent rapidity. The noise was inescapable and the visitor instantly identifiable. 

"I'll let Mr. Havelock know," said Elaine, gathering up her gloves and summer coat. "You won't let her keep you too long?"

"Of course not, my dear," said Miss Montague, who had long since taken Bella's measure and matched it, fond as she was. "And I believe we are down to the last of the ginger biscuits."

Immediately, though, it became clear that an entire barrel of biscuits might not be sufficient, as the sound of voices in the hall swelled, and the clatter of umbrellas and overshoes and the rustle of coats filled the house. It was Bella who dashed through the door first, to take up her throne on the footstool at Miss Montague's feet, and then Polly with her shy smile, and Job, and Isaac, with the bundle of the Celestial Clock safely stowed in his arms, and Mr. Garland....

Gravely, Job brought forward the side-table to Miss Montague's chair, and Isaac laid down the clock, and freed it of its swaddling clothes.

"This is the Celestial Clock," said Isaac.

It was, quite clearly, a masterpiece. They were silent, even Job, as the clock glimmered in the gas light, its intricate shadowed fretwork clearly of the city and the fens, its horological zodiac so vividly alive it seemed as if the fish might leap from its flowing stream, and the goat bend its head to the lush grass. 

"Oh, Isaac," said Emma, and swallowed. "How pretty this is." 

"I am so very glad to have seen such a thing," said Miss Montague, and glanced at her own dear Lyre clock on the escritoire, with its little circle of enamelled birds. That, too, was Isaac's work. 

"Oh!" exclaimed Elaine. "The fretwork is just like my own!"

"The clock was made for the Dean," Isaac said, so shyly that he could not look her in the eye, for Elaine was known to him solely by her proud beauty. "It's for you."

"This is the clock - the clock he meant for me?" Elaine said. She touched its casing, very gently, so that they could all see her hands were unsteady.

"Yes," said Isaac. 

Elaine Ayscough was crying. Stricken, Isaac snatched for his handkerchief, and discovered to his horror that it was splotched with linseed oil and decorated with walnut shavings: it was Job who pressed Polly's clean, plain cotton square into Elaine's hands, and kindly placed his broad back between her and the rest of the drawing room, as Miss Montague led a sprightly discussion on the perils of too many ginger biscuits. Three, it was agreed, were quite sufficient.

The storm of tears was fierce, but brief. Elaine slipped away to wash her face, and in Miss Montague's spotted silver mirror, discovered she could look herself in the eyes. She was not just the woman who had failed to understand the value of what she had: she was the woman who was building a legacy that was worthy of the man she had married, and the people who had brought her the clock knew it.

When she slipped back into the room, Isaac was explaining the hours of the zodiac to Miss Bella, and Polly was taking a professional interest in Sarah's recipe for ginger biscuits. Emma had been found a chair by Mr. Garland, and was discussing the advantages of lavender over camphor, while Job had found a copy of a guide to Venice in Mrs. Montague's bookcase, and was studying the engravings. None of them were the society acquaintances she had valued in the past, and yet one of them was a dear friend, and others could be. 

"Mr. Peabody, I shall do my best to be worthy of your clock," Elaine promised.

Isaac looked up, and vouchsafed her the sweetest of smiles, although that smile was already a little vague. For Isaac was already imagining a clock of classical proportions, with a fretwork of Corinthian acanthus and a pantheon of softly draped goddesses. He would lend Job his own copy of Brewer's _Phrase and Fable_ directly they were home, and they could read it aloud, while Polly heated up their stew and warmed the rolls.

Emma had been used to read aloud to their father. Isaac hesitated, cringed, and braced himself. "Emma," he said. "Emma, would you care to come to dinner?"

**Author's Note:**

> _The Celestial Clock_ references Gerald Manley Hopkins' _Pied Beauty_ , drawn to mind by Elizabeth Goudge's wonderful descriptions of Fenland skies.


End file.
